


lighthousekeeping

by autoclaves



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Fluff and Angst, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, References to Depression, Set in Episodes 159-160 | Scottish Safehouse Period (The Magnus Archives), Tenderness, ft. a pretentious amount of ocean vuong. dumplings. martin depression lore. massive projection, this goes from depression to tenderness to banter and back again so fast i have no idea how to tag, yes i'm writing another food as a love language jonmartin fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:41:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24958549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.Ocean Vuong said that. Martin doesn’t think himself a monster, not quite, but he feels like a lighthouse more often than not. Shelter, warning, victim, witness, beacon.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 18
Kudos: 112





	lighthousekeeping

**Author's Note:**

> i thought about making dumplings and simply went feral
> 
> title: lighthousekeeping by jeanette winterson

_ To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.  _ Ocean Vuong said that. Martin doesn’t think himself a monster, not quite, but he feels like a lighthouse more often than not. 

The Lonely comes and goes. It’s there in the incessant ticking of the clock, the mornings where he can’t bear to wake up, the cold that sets in and refuses to be chased out. He stays despite it all. A lighthouse, or its dogged keeper. Shelter, warning, victim, witness, beacon. 

It’s been a strange, wandering kind of day. He wonders if a depressive episode is setting in. These days, he can hardly tell the difference between the Lonely and just ordinary double depression. Is it dysthymia or an eldritch fear god? The thought would be funnier if he could manage to laugh right now. 

Inexplicably, he thinks back to one honors-level creative writing class he’d taken up in high school. The teacher had told him that his portfolio had potential, but marked him down for lack of attention to the more technical aspects; his work needed refinement for it to truly sing, the kind of revision and care that he never managed to make time for, between a worsening mother and two minimum-wage jobs and the constant, anxious need to make ends meet. He doesn’t know why he’s only just remembering it now; he hasn’t thought about writing in months, and that particular class had been a dozen years ago. 

Now, with the cold breath of the Lonely ghosting over the room, it makes him feel wanting. Small and selfish and pathetic, always reaching for more than what anyone was willing to give him. It hadn’t even been the instructor’s fault—she’d been very kind in her final feedback, and a good teacher with years of experience.  _ (So that means it’s you,  _ a voice says.  _ If you’d just tried a little harder like everyone else—)  _ All these  _ not-enoughs  _ over the years. The rejections of his wasted potential, the ones he should have fought harder to make something out of. 

He’d told Jon that maybe the Lonely had always had him. He thinks it might have been the truest thing he’d said during those desperately unhappy months working with Peter. 

“Martin? Martin!” There’s a voice somewhere to his right, stretched thin like whining static. There’s a voice, and he should get back to it. He has to answer it. He’s just so  _ tired.  _

“Martin,” Jon says, louder. All of a sudden there’s arms wrapping themselves around him, and Jon’s head is burying itself in the crook of his neck. 

“I, I—Jon,” Martin manages.  _ “Jon.”  _ Jon’s shaking body is so warm. He doesn’t realize he’s cold until he feels it, until he realizes how warm the rest of the world should be. 

“You… I woke up and you weren’t there.” Jon’s voice is muffled, tamping down his frantic worry. Martin squeezes his waist in what he hopes is a comforting gesture. It’s hard to think at all in the Lonely, and his mind loops like a broken record as he tries to concentrate. 

They’re in the kitchen, he observes, trying to string together a coherent train of thought. That’s good. That’s safe. 

There is moonlight splashing over the faux-marble countertops. The night air is startlingly warm where it spills from the half-open window. It’s quiet and still, everything in its place undisturbed. 

How does he feel about that? Nothing much, at the moment. But better than in the Lonely. Safer. Jon is here, too, and being with Jon is its own tangle of soft, aching emotions. 

“You were so pale, Martin. I thought, I thought…” Jon trails off, and raises his head to look at Martin properly. There’s an anxious furrow between his brows. He doesn’t complete the sentence; some alternatives don’t bear thinking about, neither of them willing to speak them into existence. 

“Sorry,” Martin says automatically, wanting that crease on his forehead, the tangible lines of Jon’s worry, to smooth away. He’s close enough to touch, but his hand can’t quite move to close the gap, so he just settles for the apology. 

Jon shakes his head. “No, don’t apologize.” He takes a breath, and then another one. Martin pulls him a little closer. “You weren’t in bed. I found you here with that—damned fog around you, and you didn’t respond at first, so I panicked. I thought I wouldn’t be able to get you back. I’m still… a little on edge even now. Are you okay?” 

(They’ve been trying to communicate better. That’s what Jon’s doing, laying out what happened and how he felt about it so they can both understand the situation. He’s trying so hard, and Martin loves him for it.) 

“I couldn’t sleep, so I came out here. And… and I don’t remember what happened after that. The Lonely came in at some point. As it does. And then I heard you.” The sentences aren’t quite right or smooth; he’s straining just to pull them together. 

Jon nods, and kisses his cheek, lips lingering on the skin there. “I was worried. I’m glad you’re okay,” he murmurs. The small movements of his mouth as he speaks makes Martin feel almost like a person again. 

“It was so cold there,” Martin says. “I was so cold.” It’s not what he means to say at all, but Jon understands anyway. 

“I’ll find you,” he promises. “If you ever need me to.” 

“I know.” Martin drifts a hand across his cheekbone, thumbing the soft skin at the corner of Jon’s eye. Another promise, of sorts. 

“Come back to bed? Or unless you’d rather stay up? I know you don’t sleep much when your depression gets worse.” 

“Yeah,” Martin says quietly. “I’m… I’m not sure what I want, exactly. But I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep anyway.” He nearly apologizes again, but bites it back before the words leave his mouth. Instead, he just keeps running careful fingers over Jon’s upturned face. He is allowed to feel the things he does. 

“Okay. We’ll just do something easy, then. Until it sticks.” 

Martin almost smiles despite himself. The fog is almost gone, and he has Jon now. “Like what?” 

“We can cook?” Jon says, going to turn on the lights. The kitchen floods with soft yellow, everything suddenly rendered more real than the ghostly silhouettes they’d been surrounded by all this time. A sudden, paralyzing rush of relief goes through him at the sight of all their appliances, in immaculate working order. There, the pink and green dishes they’d washed together that evening; there, the squat toaster plugged in next to the stove; there, the utensils hanging from the copper hooks that line their walls. All there, unchanged and whole, no trace of the Lonely to mar them. 

“What, at”—Martin checks the digital clock on the oven, blinking a bright, steady green—“two o’clock in the morning?” 

“We’re adults,” Jon says, a little mulishly. 

Martin only manages a weak, exasperated grin in lieu of actual dialogue, but Jon makes a face anyway as if he’d spoken out loud, and pulls him to the fridge by hand. He starts rummaging methodically through the top shelf, Martin behind him. The strong lines of Jon’s hand ground him; for someone almost spindly in the way his bones stick to skin, Jon’s grip is unrelentingly fierce, never once faltering despite how cold and clammy Martin’s own hand must be. 

“We have dumpling filling leftover from Friday,” Jon says. “We said we were going to try and make some together. Never got around to properly doing it.” 

“Not sure I’d be much use, honestly,” Martin tells him. The Lonely, the dysthymia—whatever it is, it’s still looming and empty inside of him. (Love isn’t a silver bullet. Love takes work, and time, and so does cooking, and so does healing.) “I know I was going to teach you how to shape them—” 

“That’s okay. I’ll figure it out.” Martin raises a dubious eyebrow at the thought of Jon  _ figuring out _ anything even remotely related to cooking, and Jon laughs, knocking his head against Martin’s shoulder in retaliation. He brings their clasped hands to his cheek, briefly, and kisses the tops of their fingers. “And I love you,” he says, easy as breathing. 

“I love you, too,” Martin responds automatically, then inhales in surprise as the refrigerator starts beeping at them; they’d held the door open for too long. Jon jumps, hand tightening convulsively. 

“Okay, okay, dumplings it is,” Martin says quickly, and lets the door slam shut into silence once Jon has ducked out of the way with the covered bowl of filling in hand. Jon grins at his acquiescence, a quiet private thing that aches in the middle of his chest. He feels—more settled, now. The incessant looping of his thoughts wears down smooth and gentle, more substance than hungry echo. 

“Sorry,” he feels compelled to add, patting the handle—that apology doesn’t count because it’s directed to the fridge. 

“Stop  _ talking  _ to our refrigerator.” Jon starts unwrapping the bowl with one hand, setting it down on the island counter next to them and scrabbling at the cling wrap with his fingernails. 

“That might be easier if you let go of my hand.” 

Jon’s face looks  _ genuinely _ appalled at that. God. He loves this man. “No,” he finally says. “Oh! We need—we need the, I’ll get the wrappers.” 

So Jon gets the wrappers off the shelf, and draws a bowl of water, and brings out the cutting board to use as a flat surface. He lets Martin fuss over the placement of the dishes until they’re arranged in the specific way he favors when he makes dumplings. They don’t hold hands all the way through the process, but they bump elbows and forearms and shoulders, and Martin even manages a laugh, once, as Jon coaxes him onto the counter to watch his attempts at filling and folding the dumplings; little by little, the Lonely loosens its grip on their safehouse. 

“You put in about a spoonful—not too much, because it’ll burst. I was always bad at measuring it out,” Martin tells him. His legs swing as he perches, and the repetitive motion makes him feel too much like a child again. 

His mother had made  _ mandu  _ every Chuseok and New Year, when he was younger. He remembers her hands as they held the long wooden spoon she used to mix the meat, quick and neat before the illness made them unsure. Those recollections are tinted rosy, but painful in their own way; he can’t separate the sickness from the woman or the resentment from the mother. Doubt is a constant in every childhood memory he has. 

Jon taps the spoon against the bowl, trying to shake some of the excess filling off it before carefully setting it in the very middle of the round, pale wrapper laid out on the cutting board. Martin glides an absent hand over his hair as a reward. 

“My mother used to make dumplings,” he says, suddenly. He feels like he has to say it to  _ someone.  _

“Did she teach you?” 

“No, I kind of had to… learn that myself.” (The first batch, attempted during the holidays the year he turned ten, had been a mess. Martin had cleaned it up before she arrived home, but he thinks she’d known, anyway. She hadn’t said anything; there was no dish of  _ mandu  _ at their meager Lunar New Year dinner that year.) 

Jon prods at the lump of filling with his spoon. There’s a sharp look on his face, the same look that he gets whenever Martin mentions the absence of his mother—that’s Jon withholding vicious commentary, he knows, more for Martin’s own sake than any lack of active disdain at the fact. 

“It’s alright, Jon, really. I’m making them with you now, aren’t I?” 

He takes Jon’s hands in his for the folding, guiding him through the motions. He doesn’t have to, really, but it feels good, doing it. (Jon’s hands are darker than his, and smaller, with the sharp slants of his knuckles jutting into Martin’s palms. Martin kisses them before they start, and Jon shudders against him with a sigh.) 

“It’s not about my mother,” Martin continues, quieter. “It’s about how I’m making  _ mandu _ with someone I love, and who loves me back.” 

Martin shows him how to dab the edges of the peel with water, and fold over, pressing their fingers into the edge to seal it up. And then there’s a single dumpling sitting in front of them, pale and unevenly nondescript. 

“Huh,” Jon says. 

“Yeah.” Martin wraps both arms around him, and Jon presses his face against the embrace. 

They make dumplings until the stack of wrappers is reduced by more than half—there’s no way they can eat all of them in one sitting in the middle of the night, but maybe they’ll save the leftovers to eat again later. Martin likes that a lot, the idea that there will be more than enough and the idea that there will be a later. He feels warmer by degrees. 

“I’ll put the water on,” he says, while Jon is pleating a dumpling. He’s not as quick as Martin, but his fingers are careful and precise. 

“Mhm.” Jon finishes the one he’s working on, and leans himself against Martin’s shoulder as he checks that the half-filled pot of water on the stove is boiling. Martin puts an upside-down sieve into it so that the food won’t touch the water, and then slides the plate of dumplings onto the raised swell of the sieve. 

“Now we wait,” Martin says. He’s always liked steamed  _ mandu.  _ Time and water and heat is all it takes; just let it sit, and everything else will fall into place. 

“How long?” 

Martin side-eyes the pot. “Fifteen… minutes? Ten?” 

Jon side-eyes him. “Do you not know?” 

“I’ve always just—poked at it. And if it’s done, it’s done.” At Jon’s sputter, Martin points an accusatory finger at him. “Do  _ you _ not Know?” 

“No, Martin, I do not Know how long you have to steam dumplings for,” Jon says, deadpan, shaking his head. Fondness lines the edges of his voice. 

(The answer is around twelve minutes, at which point the toothpick they slide into one of the dumplings comes out clean. Jon immediately steals one from the pot to eat, and burns the roof of his mouth exactly as he deserves to.) 

The dumplings turn out well, hot and flavorful. They eat them sitting next to each other at the table, passing the plate back and forth in the few inches of space between their hands, while the moon passes over the safehouse and shifts its light across hardwood floors. Martin quotes Ocean Vuong. They talk about lighthouses. They barricade the monsters. 

_ Perhaps we are each a lighthouse, _ he thinks. That seems like a very lonely existence, simply viewing each other’s lights from across the dark water, able to acknowledge the presence of another but never to touch. 

Chopsticks click against porcelain, and Jon says, “Perhaps we are in the lighthouse together.” 

“I like that,” Martin says. The lighthouse as a sanctuary. The lighthouse as a small house tucked into the rolling Scottish highlands. 

**Author's Note:**

> highkey based off [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24180472) \- i'm gonna populate the extremely niche tag of "jonmartin cooking for each other in the safehouse" if it kills me 🥺
> 
> mandu are korean-style dumplings and they're so good. why is martin korean? projection reasons and projection reasons only.
> 
> tumblr: [@autoclavesjpg](http://autoclavesjpg.tumblr.com/)


End file.
